If you purchased one of Apple's MacBook Air laptops back when it came with a flash drive for restoration purposes, that drive is now a little obsolete with the release of Lion (should you decide to upgrade). Fortunately there's a method to turn it into a standard flash drive, or even a Lion install disk. Here's how.

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Tech blog Tech Plus points out a handy tool called SM32Xtest, which will let you unlock the drive for formatting. It's a Windows-only tool, so you'll either need a boot camp partition, a virtual machine, or a separate Windows computer to do this. While we couldn't test this method ourselves, for lack of a Apple-locked restore drive, the video above (by MacBenTosh) will walk you through the entire process. Once you've wiped the drive, you can turn it into a Lion install disk or use it for anything you want.